The deadly crash of Asiana Flight 214 in San Francisco not only marked the first time a passenger airliner landed short of the runway in the United States in two decades, but it also has become one of the rarest of aviation accidents in an era when pilots are guided by sophisticated technology in the cockpit and on the ground.

How rare are they? Only 20 short-landings have been reported among the hundreds of millions of commercial flights that either took off or landed at U.S. airports since 1973, an analysis by this newspaper of Federal Aviation Administration data shows.

All but one of them was blamed on pilot error. Not only does the data highlight just how rare it is for a jetliner to undershoot a runway, it also shows how unusual it is for someone to die or be injured when it happens: For the past four decades, the odds of being on a commercial airliner in which somebody dies in a short-landing in the U.S. were more than 400 million to 1.

Teenage friends Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia were killed and 181 people injured Saturday when a Boeing 777 came in too low and too slow, clipping a sea wall and tearing off the plane's tail. No one had died in a similar crash in the U.S. since 131 people were killed in Dallas in 1985. And that crash, of Delta Flight 191, happened during heavy thunderstorms, not the nearly perfect, cloudless conditions of Saturday morning. Only one other person was even injured in the 19 other short-landings, data shows.

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Most of those previous crashes involved veteran pilots with as many as 25,000 hours of flight time.

But after two dozen short-landings between 1978 and 1993, a burst of technological advances in planes and land-based systems to guide them safely on to runways made short-landings virtually a thing of the past, aviation experts said.

"The genesis of the (Boeing) 737-300 and (McDonnell Douglas) MD-80 brought the technology into vogue," said J.F. Joseph, of Joseph Aviation Consulting of Kyle, Texas.

Investigators are keying on the likelihood of errors by pilot Lee Gang-guk, making his maiden landing at San Francisco International Airport, and veteran Lee Jeong-Min, serving for the first time as a training officer, and possible mechanical glitches as the plane swooped low over San Francisco Bay after an 11-hour flight from Seoul. A ground-based device to guide planes onto runways at SFO had been switched off for about a month, officials said, and the pilots may have been mixed up about whether a navigation aid designed to maintain airspeed, similar to cruise control in a car, was switched all the way on.

But even without technological aids, experts said, it is a mystery why the pilots couldn't land the plane safely, just like the average 10.4 million flights that leave from or land at U.S. airports every year.

"In a plane like the 777 we have very sophisticated automation, but the pilots can hand fly, manually fly, from takeoff to landing," said National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman, whose agency is investigating Saturday's crash.

Hersman said Wednesday that planes can now land in "zero-zero" conditions -- meaning heavy snow or rain that makes it impossible to see outside the cockpit.

"With the new technologies ... the pilot doesn't need a visual sighting for the airplane to land," said Capt. Larry Rooney, a Pennsylvania-based pilot who has flown jetliners for three decades. "Autopilot and auto-landing technology is amazing, but it's only as good as the pilot behind the controls. It's like a surgeon. The surgery is only as good as the person holding the scalpel."

Short-landings are much more frequent in small planes, including private craft that lack guidance systems and professional pilots. Nationally, the FAA has attributed more 2,200 accidents in all planes to short-landings since 1973. By far the most common cause of an airplane accident is a mechanical or system problem, the data shows.

Coupled with the technology is the fact that the average U.S. pilot has more than 10 years of experience, said veteran airline pilot Robert Herbst. "The amount of experience has never been higher. I'm going to give a lot of credit for the safety record in the U.S. to the highest experience level of pilots."

Internationally, several short-landings have occurred in recent years, including a British Airways flight that came down about 1,000 feet short of its runway at London's Heathrow Airport in 2008 -- an accident attributed to a buildup of ice in a fuel system. One passenger suffered a serious injury. In Amsterdam in 2009, a Turkish Airlines flight fell short of the runway by less than a mile when a faulty altimeter caused the plane to automatically slow down, causing it to stall. Nine people were killed, including all three pilots.

Asiana 214's slow airspeed apparently caused its pilots to make a frantic attempt to gun the engines and abort the landing seconds before the crash. Survivors and witnesses described a sudden attempt to climb just before it clipped the sea wall in front of the runway.

Before Saturday, the last short-landing in the U.S. was on Dec. 8, 1993, also in Dallas, when an America West flight came down in fog about 1,100 feet short of the runway because of pilot error. It skidded for a little more than 100 feet, regained flight briefly and then skidded more than 500 feet onto the runway, crushing a set of landing lights on the ground. Because the plane was still going too fast to stop safely, pilots took off and then landed again without anything else going wrong.

Sometimes, a short-landing is simply a matter of inches. Reports show that in 1968, a pilot shuttling an empty 747 between Boeing landing strips in Washington state came in too low for a landing and thudded into an earthen berm at the end of a runway, damaging the plane. He was not injured.